I think this is the right take on this.

All of this is fundamentally rooted in legal compliance things and the only reason you can see any western open source organizations not following suit is because their "violation" has flown under the radar so far. While going European-based helps with a lot of other US bullshit, in this case it doesn't because the sanction situation is largely the same across most of the world. You could go with one of those Chinese or Russian (maybe Indian?) distributions I suppose, but those come with their own problems.

Even if you're prepared to make your own Linux distribution - If you're in the US, Europe, or much of the rest of the world, you're in the same legal situation as all the existing projects and risk criminal persecution for violating sanctions. Well, in theory at least, I haven't heard of many arrests or convictions actually happening because of open source software. If you want to gamble on it never actually happening then sure, go ahead.

As humans we like our agency, which makes it tempting to think of \<any world problem\> as something that can be solved by making mildly inconvenient lifestyle decisions, but unfortunately that's just not how things work at this scale. Solving this issue requires lifting the sanctions, which requires a successful left wing (or at least left leaning) political movement to happen in a large chunk of the world. It's perfectly fine to also make that lifestyle decision, but it's important to keep the bigger picture in mind.

Clarification edit: At the same thing, it's also important to see that the problem is happening, so signal boosting blog posts like this absolutely has value despite all of this.